European fisheries at the edge: the cases of the two fishing communities of Lampedusa and Fuerteventura

When sociologically involving individuals, European studies somehow left aside European society: a ground-level sociological study of how European citizens experience the EU is missing. However, even though the EU can be still seen as an ongoing process of institutional construction, nowadays as never before we can also speak of Europe as an established polity producing real effects in people’s daily lives. In other words, the time has come to start looking to the outcomes that such an institution has on citizens, rather than focusing exclusively on what this institution is and how it does work. Thus, moving from this critical stand, this study analyses whether and how the EU affects the daily life dimension of European citizens: to do so, well established European policies need to be taken into account. Moving from this perspective then, this investigation focuses on the cases of two small- scale fishing communities living along the European external border, in the Sicilian island of Lampedusa - Italy - and in the one of Fuerteventura, part of the Canary Islands archipelago -Spain. Local fishermen activities as well as their lives in the islands are indeed mainly impacted by two well established - and only apparently disjointed - EU policies: the Common Fishery Policy - CFP - on the one side, and the European external border management on the other. Fishery, a marginal European economic sector, is indeed one of the areas more strictly regulated and largely subsidised by the EU. On the other hand, due to the geographical location of the islands - closer to Africa than to Europe - these two territories work as isolated offshoot of the widening Schen- gen area of free movement of people. Due to this geopolitical location, since the end of the 1990s thousands of boat-migrants coming from the coasts of Africa begun to reach the two islands. A phenomena to which the EU locally responded opening migrants detention centres while militarizing the sea-bor- der, generating a permanent state of emergency in the islands and in their surrounding sea waters. In other words, in light of their marginal locations, both islands became central within the framework of the management of the European external border and, more broadly, of EU migration policies. A cen- trality however not corresponded in terms of fishing policies, especially con- sidering the local implementation of EU harmonizing norms and regulation in such peripheral territories. Empirically, here the border works as a methodological choice. The goal is in fact the one of bringing the margins at the centre, showing how they are fundamental both in socio, political and economic terms to define the centre itself. It is at the border where policies designed for the flat borderless EU ter- ritory are expected to have a major impact, revealing themselves more visibly. Thus, through two periods of study of five to six months in each island, several in-depth interviews have been conducted with local small-scale fishermen, alongside a day to day ethnographic-like observation, a consistent number of semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders - fishery organizations, cooperatives and associations; coast guard; local administration and so like - and policy makers in Brussels, and the shooting of a documentary.